They want to turn the corner house into a hotel. This will save people from the “victim position”

At the same time, he noted that the Corner House was beneficial for filmmakers, since it was possible to film the most complex scenes associated with the Soviet period or the period of Soviet occupation in Latvia, the imprisonment of dissidents or the moment of occupation, as well as individual scenes of the war period.

“The corner house really has that heaviness that this house has, maybe it should be left, it should be allowed to turn into something completely different. In fact, it might need to be restored to its original appearance as it was actually a hotel or rental house. It was not originally planned that this would be a repressive institution,” the director said.

Perhaps changing the meaning of a room can also change the way it does not lie “as a heavy burden on the human consciousness,” Simanis said, adding that in this way the house forces us to return once more and once more to the position of victim.

“For this we have a museum of occupation, there are other specific places where these memory institutions can work.

Maybe this is the case when we need to let this change,” says Simanis.

Let us remind you that the state, having significantly reduced the price, is once more putting up for auction a building in the center of Riga, where the KGB of the LSSR was located in Soviet times. Some are outraged: in their opinion, this is the same as trying to sell Auschwitz.

The so-called “Corner House” – a six-story building on Brivibas and Stabu streets – was built more than a century ago, in 1912, as an apartment building with shops below.

But in Soviet times, it housed the NKVD of the Latvian SSR, which later became the KGB of the LSSR. And it stood at that time on the corner of Lenin and Engels streets.